Friday, 5 October 2012

.....Tree-leaves labour up and down,..........And through them the fainting light..........Succumbs to the crawl of night......Outside in the road the telegraph wire..........To the town from the darkening land
Intones to travelers like a spectral lyre..........Swept by a spectral hand.

.....A car comes up, with lamps full-glare,..........That flash upon a tree:..........It has nothing to do with me,.....And whangs along in a world of its own,..........Leaving a blacker air;
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,.....And nobody pulls up there.

In Came Wood, Dorset. The bridleway towards Warren Barn runs for a short way inside Came Wood, a deciduous woodland: photo by Graham Horn, 19 November 2007

Bridleway towards Warren Barn. The northern part of Came Wood is to the
left. The bridleway drops to a minor valley before continuing towards
Warren Barn. Arable land to the right: photo by Graham Horn, 19 November 2007

The striking modernity of the poem, the telegraph wires and auto headlamps, remind us that Hardy, in his work and thought, had bridged the abyss of the centuries.

Sixteen months before writing the poem, he had made this note:

"10 June 1923. Relativity. That things and events always were, are, and will be (e.g., Emma, Mother and Father are living still in the past)."

By now he had remarried. His second wife, Florence, had been released from hospital following surgery, and Hardy's brother was driving her home to Max Gate. They were late, Hardy was feeling the acute loneliness that was by this time his closest companion. But I don't see any self-pity in this; it's as if he had accepted the fact that nobody was going to come, in some larger sense.

Here he seems to have stepped back, or stepped aside, as the night conquers, and the car carrying unknown strangers

whangs along in a world of its own.

That verb "whangs"-- Hardy's genius was to have the perfect word spot-on for the occasion -- even if as in this case the occasion wasn't really the point, and the word had to be invented.

"The striking modernity of the poem, the telegraph wires and auto headlamps, remind us that Hardy, in his work and thought, had bridged the abyss of the centuries." Exactly--BTW, who was it that said Hardy was the "brooding precursor of modern poetry"? I keep thinking it might be Ransom (from his introduction to Hardy's "Selected Poems") but since I've mislaid it (way to go,schmuck) I have no way ofverifying that.

A life that spans not just two centuries but two eras is a life different from most. It was Hardy’s fortune not just to live across two centuries, but to experience the decline of one age and the rise of another . . . one that was to be vastly different, and move at an almost incomprehensible speed. Millions more had the same experience of course, but it was Hardy’s genius to sense, to feel what was happening to him and all around him, and to write about it, to make an honest attempt to capture some of the bewildering uncertainty and beauty and horror at what was being wrenched away, at times violently, and what was taking its place. Hardy stands out as a man who tried to understand his time and the impermanence of what for hundreds of years the world had figured—wrongly, as it turns out—to be eternal.